Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht über den Zeitraum von 1994 bis 2004 die kommunale Finanzsituation der Stadt Potsdam. Anhand eines Kennzahlensystems, das aus den Daten der entsprechenden kommunalen Haushaltspläne entwickelt wurde, konnten Aussagen über die Entwicklung der Einnahmen und...

This paper uses the findings of a very recent major international research collaboration on the impact of federal arrangements on the development of the welfare state to explore the possibilities of progress beyond Europe's present diversity of nation-state welfare standards. These findings -...

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

In federal countries, competence for policy matters is often shared between various levels of government. As only overall outcomes are observed, this might blur accountability by decreasing voters' ability to infer information about the performance of their leaders. In this article, we analyse...

Most US federal environmental policies allow states to assume responsibility for implementation and enforcement of regulations; states with this responsibility are referred to as “authorized” or having “primacy.” Although such decentralization may have benefits, it may also have costs...

We explore the effect of transparency of fiscal institutions on the scale of government and gubernatorial popularity using a formal model of accountability. We construct an index of fiscal transparency for the American states from detailed budgetary information. With cross-section data for...

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of speeches by Federal Reserve (Fed) officials over the period January 1998 to September 2009. Econometrically, we use a probit model with regional and national macroeconomic variables to explain the subjectively coded content of these speeches. Our...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...